different between atrabilious vs bilious

English

From Latin ?tra b?lis (“black bile”) (?ter (“dark, black”) + b?lis (“bile”)) +? -ous (“full of”).

atrabilious (comparative more atrabilious, superlative most atrabilious)

(medicine, obsolete) Having an excess of black bile.
- 1645, Arthur Wilson, quoted in Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-century England, London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1984, ISBN 978-0-297-78381-7:
  [I] could see nothing in the evidence which did persuade me to think them other than poor, melancholy, envious, mischievous, ill-disposed, ill-dieted, atrabilious constitutions.
Characterized by melancholy.
Do we listen to pop music because of atrabiliousness, or are we atrabilious because we listen to pop music? (High Fidelity magazine paraphrase)
Ill-natured; malevolent; cantankerous.

From French bilieux, from Latin b?li?sus (“full of bile”), from b?lis (“bile”) + -?sus (“full of”).

bilious (comparative more bilious, superlative most bilious)

Of or pertaining to something containing or consisting of bile.
Resembling bile, especially in color.
- 1820, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot The Tyrant: A Tragedy in Two Acts:
  Does money fail?—come to my mint—coin paper,
  Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed
  To show his bilious face, go purge himself,
  In emulation of her vestal whiteness.
- 1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, Chapter III:
  The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow.
- 1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, `Prologue:
  A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney.
Suffering from real or supposed liver disorder, especially excessive secretions of bile.
Peevishly ill-humored, irritable or bad tempered; irascible.
- 1934 George Orwell, Burmese Days:
  The boarders, sharp-tongued bilious widows, pursued the only man in the establishment, a mild, bald creature who worked in La Samaritaine […] "

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